WEBSITE PROMOTION DIY GUIDE
OverviewCheck your own rankings
Check your competitors rankings
What makes a good site to promote
What makes a bad site to promote
Promoting difficult websites
Meta Tags
Copy
File Names
Keywords and Keywords Phrases
Description
Hyperlinks
Important Search Engines and Directories
Registration Fees
Other Tips
What Not To Do
Hyperlinks
Your website must have a navigation structure of internal hyperlinks but your website should also have several hyperlinks to other websites and from other websites leading to your website. This is because some search engines believe that the more popular a website is, the more links to it, and they rank them highly. The quality of the links are also checked so it is better to link to, and be linked from popular quality sites. It is also important that you have at least one text hyperlink on your index page that includes your keyword phrase.
Important Search Engines and Directories
Important search engines are:
Alta Vista, AOL, Excite, Google, Inktomi, Looksmart, Lycos, Hotbot, MSN, Netscape, ODP, Yahoo.
Other major search engines:
About, Ah-Ha, All the Web, BBC, CNN, Dogpile, Entireweb, E-spotting, Euroseek, Freeserve, Go, Goo, ICQit!, Infoseek, iWon, Mirago, NBCi, NTL, Overture, Splut, Teoma, Terra, UK Directory, Web Crawler, WhatUseek.
Search Engine Registration Fees
Not much more than 2 years ago most search engine registrations were free,
and Yahoo led the way of making companies pay for registration followed
by most of the popular search engines. Once registration fees became the
norm, registration fees were hyped, often by increases of 100% a year. Yahoo
are currently the most expensive with an "Annually recurring"
fee of GBP£199 or US$299. This now means if you want five of your
pages promoted on the top ten search engines it can easily cost GBP£4000+
or US$6000 a year with no guarantee of being anywhere near page one. If
you run a worldwide "Pay Per Click" campaign on just one search
engine like Google's "Adwords" if could easily cost US$20,000
per month. Ad up all the other "Pay Per Click" or "Sponsored"
page one listings on the top 10 search engines and you could easily spend
well in excess on six figures a year.
Other Tips
Most top search engines want quality website to be returned on search results so shape up because poor sites are being marked down.
Update your site regularly, even if you just move a space along a line a little. This is noticed by spiders. Websites that have not been updated for a while can get categorised as being dormant.
Read the "Submission Guidelines" on the search engines. They
all have them and they tell you what to do and what not to do to get listed.
You can learn a lot from them like how to avoid deleting your website instead
of resubmitting it!
What Not To Do
Cloaking Pages - not generally a good idea as you could easily get your website banned because most top search engines can recognise them and so do their editors. Another good reason to avoid cloaking pages are the website companies that use them. Often they convince you it is the latest technology that works without being noticed, blinding you with science. But the real reason they want you to use them is because it is less work for them, promoting a page on their network with just your keyword phrases on it, and they keep control of your traffic. They promote the cloaking page, usually doing do badly but regularly get one or two page one listings out of five keyword phrase (We get an average of over 100 page one rankings with 5 keyword phrases). They then use this as an example of their "success" but if you complain and decide not to renew your traffic is suddenly terminated. We regularly get customers that have had bad experiences from some of our competitors.
Do not try to promote sites that are still under construction or have broken links. There are all checked now and you will not get listed by many search engines.
Do not have text the same colour as the background. Techniques to hide content from users in an attempt to show more keywords to search engines are now more and more frequently caught by search engine editors leading to websites acquiring low rank or worse, a banned or blacklist against their domain.
Do not have any hidden text, it is very easy to spot.
Do not use capital letters in your descriptions, meta tags, etc, unless necessary.
Do not leave out important contact details such as your name and address.
Unless you want to be viewed as being dodgy.